What is Cerbos

Cerbos is an enterprise authorization solution built to secure access across complex, distributed environments, SaaS products, and regulated systems.

The solution externalizes authorization logic from application code, making access control consistent and centrally managed across all services, saving months of dev time while ensuring compliance and security.

• Improves security by making access control highly visible, and making it easy to keep up with changing requirements.

• Provides flexible tooling for authoring, testing, and deploying access policies, and seamlessly integrates into any architecture.

• Decouples authorization from application silos and makes it reusable by all your software code written in any language, and seamlessly scales from prototype to global deployment.

The origin of our name

Startup of the Year 2024 in Access Control by HackerNoonStarups.100 2025 AwardBest in Microservices Infrastructure - API Awards 20252023 Digital Innovator AwardBest in api security - API Awards 2022

Our company name actually comes as a derivative of Cerberus. When we started Cerbos, we were thinking about different ways of protecting things and how that relates to authorization. We got to talking about dogs, and then talked about Cerberus being the ultimate protective dog. After talking it through a bit more, Cerberus became Cerbos and our logo became Cerbie, the mascot of Cerbos!

Our culture

Our mission is to make authorization easy.

We believe that the layers of software will continuously be decoupled to reduce duplicative efforts.

Our goal is to make Cerbos the go-to authorization layer solution for implementing and managing roles and permissions.

We prioritize the needs of our users. We are friendly and caring towards everyone. We assume best intent.

We have a strong engineering mindset. We are confident in our abilities, yet humble. As a team, we hold strong beliefs but are open to change with new information based on data.

We are self starters; we take initiative, build, seek feedback and iterate fast. We work in the open, cohesively, and asynchronously.

We are determined and dedicated to solving the challenges ahead of us.

The Cerbos team

We are a group of passionate, globally distributed professionals, working together to solve the complex authorization challenges for our users. We completed multiple rounds of funding from world class investors and are planning for the future.

Meet the leadership team

Alex Olivier

Alex Olivier

CPO

Charith Ellawala

Charith Ellawala

CTO

Emre Baran

Emre Baran

CEO

Join Our Community

Backed by

OMERS Ventures
Crane
Bek Ventures
Seedcamp
8-Bit Capital
OSSC

and more...

What is Cerbos?

Cerbos is an end-to-end enterprise authorization software for Zero Trust environments and AI-powered systems. It enforces fine-grained, contextual, and continuous authorization across apps, APIs, AI agents, MCP servers, services, and workloads.

Cerbos consists of an open-source Policy Decision Point, Enforcement Point integrations, and a centrally managed Policy Administration Plane (Cerbos Hub) that coordinates unified policy-based authorization across your architecture. Enforce least privilege & maintain full visibility into access decisions with Cerbos authorization.